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The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website

For owners of existing or well established websites, the need may arise to make considerable changes to the site, either as a result of a New Company Name and Domain, a required Site Facelift or a change of Site Structure, perhaps with the addition of a Content Management System, or just a change of Hosting Company. Heres some things to look out for.

New Domain Name

You might change your main Company Name or identify a better ‘keyworded’ domain and need to change the actual address of your site and if its been well indexed in the search engines then it becomes a major issue. What you need to do is use something like Google Analytics to see which are the top sites that link to you and contact them to change to your new address. You also need to contact your SEO or Web Design Company and ask them to put in place a ‘Redirect Solution’ to redirect all requests for the old address to the new one.

New Look Site and Structure

If your site looks tired or if you decide you want to manage its content yourself and add a Content Management System then its quite likely that most of your site content and pages/links will change. As above, you can implement redirects for specific pages or you can add a custom ‘Error 404 page’ which includes a full sitemap with links to your most important new pages.

New Webhost

You might need to change hosting company the odd time, maybe your current one has too much downtime or as in my case, it goes bust and takes all my sites with it! This shouldn’t cause any major SEO problems as all the important stuff basically stays the same. Just wait a few weeks after the change and make sure your stats package is still registering hits for the site in its new location.

I liked this post but I really wanted to know more about the loss of your websites. I have been wondering if something liked this happened would you be able to access your old information somehow, or would you have needed a back up of your “mysql database”?

I couldn’t image working so hard only to lose everything like the content, and links, community, and relationships. A lot goes into it but it looks like everything is running smoothly now for you! Good work and thanks for the post.

Good points . I especially like your point about responding to comments and trying to promote the guest post on stumbleupon and other social media sites. The more you give back the more writing opportunities you will get.

I think rank for highly competitive this blog. Sometimes, if you change a website drastically. though that if in google, if over night we change the entire website, structure, format, hosting etc. The temporary reduction in traffic is usually well worth the better visitor experience. You have managed to transform a very helpful thought into reality. I was looking for someone who could help me in managing my.

Leon – Good tips on what to remember when moving your website to a newer version.
I agree its very easy for people to lose a lot of their old indexed pages and backlinks at the stroke of a domain change, host change etc. The redirection set up is vital to stop losing all that traffic! Thanks for this reminder. Steve

Thank you for this post, it was a great read. I like your point about using Google analytics to gauge important domains to let them know about website changes. Great tip. I use analytics and will use it for this purpose if I need to change domains!

Yes, this is right that these are the most important for The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website. By using this process we can promote your site easily. Thanks for sharing this informative information with us.